Logo carved onto human hair

Boing Boing Gadgets' Joel Johnson was at McMaster University yesterday where he met a researcher who used a focus ion beam microsocope to carve his school's logo on a human hair. I would love one for my wunderkammer! More info over at BBG. Link

@29, 32 Generally it’s not the University providing the money for the sciences, but an external organization (NSF, DOD, etc). You just need to figure out how to sell your humanities studies to the military.

The fact that it is planar leads more to its authenticity anyway. The only way to have it mill “correctly” into a curved or cylindrical surface is to adjust the final lens voltage proportional to the curvature of the surface. A LEO (Zeiss) FIB cant easily do this.

#15: Or account for the curvature ahead of time and adjust the source image accordingly (compressing the image along y-axis for the distant surfaces) so the final projected image is milled “correctly.”

#18: They would need a way to secure the hair and move it with precision underneath the beam, like a laser printer. It’s probably mechanically easier right now to just fix the hair in position and just move the beam instead.

@14, Oh yeah, I mean, surely no one would could possibly doubt the unprovable statement of science here. Why, they just discovered a planet light years away that may be less than 2000 years old. With their portable inverse-dichromium deflector array. Aligned with the flux variance tachyon particle stream within twelve microns.

I’d say these particular images are shooped. The second image appears to be a watermark because of the angle of the logo relative to the cropping of the picture and the hair itself. I don’t doubt that people have done it, but I think these are simulations.

Tikal2k – here is a link to the current series of FIB (actually dual beam) systems used to do this specific work. (although this is probably on an older series of FIB system – universities usually dont have the cash to buy new ones)

Not fake, but very easy to do – the system I use you can just take a RGB bitmap, load it in as a pattern file, and run it. As Iguanoid says, there is barely a lab where these instruments haven’t been used to put down the company or university logo.

This image looks flat and uncontoured as it is being imaged by the ion beam that was used to write it – if they’d tilted the sample slightly after writing and before imaging (or used an electron beam to image in a dual beam system), then you’d have seen the distortion of the pattern due to the surface morphology of the hair it was written on.